Public Citizen Organizing Anti-TPP Demonstration

Public Citizen says that demonstrators will gather 2/4 at 12 noon outside the Washington, DC, headquarters of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America to protest the drug industry’s support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) expansion of medicine monopolies. The advocacy group says that demonstrators will wear surgical masks and scrubs and will carry oversized pill bottles with giant price tags to protest the TPP.

“Cancer patients, health professionals, and public health advocates will raise their life-and-death concerns about the TPP’s implications for access to cancer medicines…,” the group says. It argues that if ratified, the trade deal “would expand monopolies on brand-name medications and would prevent access to life-saving generic and biosimilar medicines that make treatment accessible for more people.”

A Public Citizen fact sheet also details its concerns with more job offshoring, lower wages, and unsafe food imports.